Your Ideas, Your Timing, Real Impact…
Ready for metamorphosis?
Life Coaching
Life coaching is sometimes confused with counseling, therapy and consulting. A consultant, and to some extent a counselor, is hired as a knowledge expert, and is asked to determine the cause and to recommend the technical solution to a technical problem. Therapists are licensed practitioners, trained to diagnose, and based on the diagnosis, utilize techniques related to mental health issues. A life coach, by contrast, enters into relationship with individuals who are healthy, yet ready for intentional change.
A life coach is a process facilitator, and is expected to determine neither the cause nor the solution to a client's problem. With a coach's navigational guidance, determining a problem's solution is within the scope of the client's own abilities. Rather than providing advice, the responsible coach will patiently yield to the process, comfortably knowing that the most effective solutions are the ones arising from within the client The solution in turn, satisfies the goals which were defined by the client, who is then prepared to act accordingly.
There are numerous methods and tools that are useful for coaches to aid their clients, and in some ways life coaching strategies can overlap consulting, therapeutic and counseling strategies. However the philosophy behind Life Coaching is that the client is the subject matter expert, thus coaching strategies always strive to develop useable goals and workplans that are conceived by the client, and performed by the client. A successful coaching experience requires these critical features:
a client who truly desires change,
a coach who listens well, and,
development of a trusting client-coach partnership.
Typical Coaching Process
There is value for preplanning a strategy for change. By necessity, healthy people have learned to limit our awareness of many things that are not immediately of concern, or useful to us. We filter out sensory input, inner thoughts, and physical pain in order to accommodate our limited bandwidth of physical and mental abilities. Unfortunately, when change is needed, some of the filters we have found useful in the past, will hinder our ability to make the changes that are necessary in our current lives. Because of this, it is often important, at the beginning of a change effort, to go back to the basics, and try to recognize any potential options, even if they seem to be uncomfortable, or unlikely solutions.
This brainstorming often leads to moments of personal insight, which can be special moments in a person's life. It also leads to better, more creative solutions to most issues a person is trying to resolve, because it opens the door to more thorough research and analysis, which yields a larger array of potential solutions. The larger array of potential solutions, is useful in the early stages of a change project, and sometimes can even help to define clearer goals.
Later, during the analysis phase, it is necessary to eliminate most of the options in the solution set, so that only the best options are acted upon. A coach can help in many ways during this winnowing process, and can help prevent the effort from bogging down in analytical overkill. Knowing that good preplanning was done offers great encouragement to the client. An assurance that everything was done to determine the best course of action can be extremely motivating, and is an essential factor in preparation for the next phase of the change project, when "action" is the key word.
While clear goals and a good solution set are critical products of good planning, the action phase of a project requires new discipline. A life coach can help tremendously during this phase, to help keep the client motivated and on track.